Joining the Varia at the unripe age of eight, he had never needed to go to school. That was fine, though. His reading speed was up to five hundred words per minute. He was proficient in Italian and Japanese, and knew over 2,000 Kanji characters by the age of ten.

After all, he was a genius, right?

Bel knew the exact diameter to swing his knives at so that they would pop through the left ventricle of the heart. Thirty degrees higher at a distance of 2.05 meters would have them puncturing the jugular. Throwing a string of knives point facing up would cause, approximately, a 36 percent more chance of hemorrhaging.

"Lussuria? What—"he had to clear his throat, as his tones were pathetically gravelly—"are you doing?"

"Your hair'll be a little longer, but at least you'll live," Lussuria sniffed, watching as his box peacock closed up the wounds. "Next time tell us if you get cut, alright? Then Bel-chan wouldn't be like this~"

Belphegor glanced down at his forearm. Necrosis, infection, the rapidly fading stench of mild gangrene. He knew the symptoms, because he was a genius.

But there was something he didn't understand, which contradicted his cranial and royal greatness.

"Why are you healing it?"

Lussuria pouted and responded with another question. "Would Bel-chan rather die?"

"Of course not," he snapped. All traces of coy humor had vanished, and he was left feeling very, very stupid.

He had felt stupid once before, all those years ago at the ring battles. Bel couldn't use his statistics to explain the look in the Vongola's eye, when his teammates were hurt. Then the feeling began to recur, like a yearly cold sometimes would. There were those bothersome patches in his memory that his intellectual prowess couldn't fill.

Why Squalo had cut off his left hand: unknown.

Why Levi worked so hard for the boss's approval, even now: unknown.

The force that kept them from killing one another over the years: unknown.

Devotion to Xanxus: unknown.

The fact that the tradition of eating holiday dinners together still held: unknown.

His reasons for making Fran wear that itchy frog-hat redolent of the original mist guardian: unknown.

It takes three minutes and twenty seconds for the lungs to fill with blood, but Belphegor didn't know how long it took for Mammon to bandage his knee when he fell. He knew every carnage-related word that ever existed in the dictionary, but he didn't know how to ask Xanxus how much he owed him for the new pair of boots. There were 218 throwing knives in his back pocket, yet he didn't know how many tiles were on the ceiling of his very own room that the Varia had given him.

Belphegor didn't know many things. After all, people weren't numbers, or clocks, and all the genius in the world couldn't tell him why Lussuria was sealing his infected arm.

Adjusting his tiara with his good hand, Bel sat up. He looked through the other's tinted shades from behind his bangs.

"Why did you bother?"

"Hmm…" Lussuria placed an index finger to his smooth cheek where it left a tiny indentation in his skin. "I don't feel like answering that~"

"Tch. Disgusting homo fag."

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